Nathalie Thomas goes under ground at Canary Wharf in London to see how
Crossrail, the biggest infrastructure project in Europe, is progressing.

Six flights of stairs below a muddy construction yard next to the Billingsgate fish market in East London, a gang of 20 miners, their faces smeared with mud, are darting along metal platforms wedged between the sides of a cavernous tunnel and a giant cylindrical machine that stretches as far as the eye can see.

The atmosphere is muggy and there’s a thick smell of clay, as a giant archimedes screw is spewing out earth that has been dug from the tunnel face just a few metres away.

These miners are operating a 150-metre long, 1,000 tonne beast nicknamed “Elizabeth”, which is slowly but surely digging its way from Canary Wharf towards Stepney Green by the end of the year and then on to Whitechapel and Liverpool Street. Its final destination is Farringdon by the end of 2014.

From the surface of Canary Wharf, where office workers scurry between the glass-clad headquarters of some of the world’s biggest banks, there are no clues that beneath their feet, miners are working 24 hours a day, seven days a week on Europe’s biggest infrastructure project.

These men are working on Crossrail, London’s newest railway line, which will connect Maidenhead and Heathrow to the west of the capital to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east via a 118 kilometre route.

The project, which has been almost 40 years in the making, will be completed in its entirety in 2019 but London’s commuters will be able to start using much of the new Crossrail network from the end of 2018. Plans for a new railway across London date back as far as the 19th Century but Crossrail, in its present form, was first mooted as part of a study into London’s railway system in 1974.

Following decades of deliberation by successive governments, work on the scheme finally started in May 2009 but it has lived in the shadows of more glamorous, headline-grabbing infrastructure projects such as the London 2012 Olympics.

But at a cost of £14.8bn compared to the near £9bn cost of the Olympics and the £1.5bn price tag for the new London Gateway “super port” in the Thames Estuary, Crossrail dwarfs all other recent infrastructure projects in the UK. Only High Speed Rail 2, which according to the government’s estimates will cost £43bn, will be bigger, if it receives the go-ahead to start construction in 2016.

As Elizabeth bores into the London clay that supports the capital north of the Thames at an average rate of 100 metres a week, the miners behind are ensuring 300 millimetre thick concrete segments, which will form the walls of the tunnel, are slotted into place.

“It’s a bit like Ikea flat pack furniture,” says Will Jobling, a deputy construction manager for Crossrail, as one miner hammers large white dowels, or pegs, into the sides of the cement blocks to make sure they slot together.

Mr Jobling is one of more than 8,000 people currently working on Crossrail across the capital although it is estimated that the equivalent of 55,000 full time jobs will have been supported during the course of the ten-year project across the UK, including at supplier companies outside of London.

Two thirds of the Crossrail network will use existing rail track. But 26 miles of new tunnels are also being constructed beneath some of London’s most built-up areas, including Bond Street, Paddington and Tottenham Court Road, using eight tunnelling machines, which to the untrained eye, are similar in appearance to the ones used to bore the Channel Tunnel in the late eighties.

Seven of the eight German-built tunnelling machines, which cost around £10m each, are now in operation, with the eighth to be launched early next year.

For many of the teams working on the project, the engineering difficulties of boring beneath highly populated areas of the capital are commonplace - many worked on the extension of the Jubilee line in the nineties and on the Channel Tunnel before that.

But the machines, which are the equivalent length of 14 London buses lined up end to end, have to weave a careful and precise path between sewers, power and water mains. Extensive surveys were carried out on existing infrastructure before work began but the machines are also fitted with lasers to ensure they don’t accidentally hit a major power supply that could plunge large parts of the capital into darkness.

“At times we have been near utilities where you could cut off Canary Wharf’s power supply,” says one engineer, almost non-chalantly.

Electricity mains aren’t the only obstacles either. Near Liverpool Street, a near 500-year-old graveyard was unearthed, which is believed to hold as many as 4,000 skeletons - many of which came from the notorious Bethlem Hospital, the world’s first lunatic asylum, better known as “Bedlam”.

Workers also had to temporarily drain part of Royal Docks to expand a Victorian tunnel in order to bring it back into use as part of the project.

Crossrail is being funded through a variety of sources, including a £4.7bn grant from the Department for Transport (DfT). London businesses are contributing through a Crossrail supplement on their business rates, while passengers will help pay off the debt raised by Transport for London once the trains are in operation. Private sector companies such as the Canary Wharf Group and Berkeley Homes, which will benefit from the project, have also contributed.

Andrew Wolstenholme, chief executive of Crossrail, insists the new railway line will be delivered “in time and on budget” and will generate a £42bn economic benefit to the UK as a whole.

Crossrail has provided vital employment for construction workers and engineers during a difficult time for the industry and eventually succeeded in winning over public and political support.

But it wasn’t always that way. In May 1994, the first Crossrail bill submitted to Parliament, was rejected on the grounds that the business case had not been proven.

It’s a familiar tale and history is threatening to repeat itself with HS2, as opposition continues to mount against the high-speed rail link. “Crossrail 2”, a separate rail line which could potentially connect areas to the south-west of London to the north-east, is also currently under consideration.

Mr Wolstenholme, who previously oversaw the construction of Heathrow Terminal 5, insists that “lessons should be learnt” from the torturous process that delayed Crossrail for decades.

The construction industry in this country is riding high after the success of the Olympics, he says, but companies need greater certainty over future projects if they are to keep investing and developing the skilled workforce required to pull off such engineering feats. A more stable pipeline of work will also help to bring down the overall costs of large-scale infrastructure projects, he says.

“If you see where UK infrastructure is right now…the reputation we are gaining to deliver on time, on cost and of high quality is building,” said Mr Wolstenholme. “UK plc is right at the top of its game in delivering these major works.

“What we need to do is find ways to bring the pipeline forward…so that the industry is presented with a continuous pipeline of these major projects.

“One of the reasons why we are always talking about the costs of doing things in the UK compared to the Continent is because we don’t have that continuity of these major projects.”